News Corp’s latest “Pulse of the Nation” survey merely confirms what dozens of other polls, nationally and internationally, confirm: the media and political elites are completely out of touch with voters on nearly every issue. Climate change, renewable energy, gender — nearly every issue that endlessly fascinates the chattering classes barely registers with voters’ real concerns.
But there is perhaps no issue on which the elite are not just out of touch, but adamantly at odds with ordinary Australians, than immigration.
Poll after poll confirms that Australians — even first-generation migrants — are fed up with unending mass-immigration. Covid might have seemed to have given Australians a breathing space, but in fact, Australia still flew in 50,000 migrants during 2020 (even as 45,000 Australian citizens were barred from coming home).
In 2022, the elite aren’t even going to pretend any more: the brakes will be off the immigration steamroller completely.
Scott Morrison will allow more than 200,000 visa holders into the country, including students, economic migrants and refugees, as the federal government transitions to the final phase of the national reopening plan.
News which will almost certainly welcomed by greedy employers and university vice-chancellors. Ordinary Australians, already dealing with choked freeways, never-ending suburban sprawl and struggling services, not to mention the endless pressure on jobs and wages from floods of new migrants, will be less enthusiastic.
Nor will they likely take kindly to being hammered with yet more vaccine mandates.
The Australian understands a key focus for the government will be the shift to booster vaccines ahead of winter to avoid a European scenario where countries have been forced to reimpose Covid-19 restrictions.
While it will, eventually, make sense for covid vaccines to be as seasonal as flu vaccines, that’s going to take time and trust from voters. Trust which has been brutalised by heavy-handed government responses to the pandemic. Having oversold the vaccines as a magic pathway to “eliminating” covid, governments are going to have to deal with the blowback to their bullying lies when they try and enforce boosters so soon.
Josh Frydenberg said safely reopening Australia’s international borders to skilled migrants and overseas students would “accelerate our economic recovery by helping to address shortages in our labour market and allowing businesses to expand and grow with confidence”.
The Treasurer said in the two years prior to the pandemic, Australia had averaged about 110,000 skilled migrants while at the same time earning “significant income” from the international student market.
The Australian
And that’s the problem.
Universities grew fat and lazy on a river of foreign student gold. At the same time, Australian students have faced a less and less valuable university experience, especially as courses are dumbed-down to pander to foreign students with lots of cash but rudimentary at best English skills.
Employers have likewise grown fat and lazy. Instead of investing in local talent, they’ve grown addicted to the sugar hit of simply importing cheap foreigners.
Economists love to pontificate about the GDP benefit of mass-migration, but ordinary Australians are quite capable of comparing the minor gain in GDP against the palpable loss stemming from over-crowded cities.
The elite, as Mark Steyn says, love mass immigration because they reap all the benefits — cheap labour and chic ethnic cafes — without ever experiencing its downsides. Voters’ experience is quite the reverse, and so long as all major parties studiously ignore them, voters’ anger will only grow.
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